Curie
From MedBib.com - Medicine & Nature
The curie (symbol Ci) is a unit of radioactivity, defined as
- 1 Ci = 3.7×1010 decays per second or becquerels.
This is roughly the activity of 1 gram of the radium isotope 226Ra, a substance studied by the pioneers of radiology, Marie and Pierre Curie. The curie has since been replaced by an SI derived unit, the becquerel (Bq), which equates to one decay per second. Therefore:
- 1 Ci = 3.7×1010 Bq
and
- 1 Bq = 2.70×10−11 Ci
The unit is named after Pierre and Marie Curie.[1][2]
A radiotherapy machine may have roughly 1000 Ci of a radioisotope such as Cesium-137 or Cobalt-60. This quantity of nuclear material can produce serious health effects with only a few minutes of exposure.
Also, a commonly-used measure of radioactivity is the microcurie:
- 1 μCi = 3.7×104 disintegrations per second = 2.22×106 disintegrations per minute
The typical human body contains roughly 0.1 μCi of naturally occurring Potassium-40.
References
- ^ curie - Britannica Online Encyclopedia
- ^ Paul W. Frame. "How the Curie Came to Be". http://www.orau.org/ptp/articlesstories/thecurie.htm. Retrieved 2008-04-30.
See also
- Ionizing radiation
- United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation
- Radiation exposure
- Radiation poisoning
- Geiger counter
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